Category Archives: thought - Page 7

The Work

Posted by on May 25, 2011 No comments

I remember being in college and hearing a quote from Elvis Costello or someone that referred to just “doing The Work.” At the time it sounded like the most pretentious thing in the world. It still does. But the more thought I put into what I do and the more I value my creative work and time, the more I begin to see that it’s more than a hobby or something I do for fun. Making music is a calling. It’s my calling. I need to take ownership of that and respect it. And that brings me to The Work.

I’ve taken to writing essays that no one will ever see. In fact, I have an entire manifesto in the works that might be read by a dozen people when it’s all said and done. In it, I rail against the common misconceptions around creating art and what an artist needs. The thesis comes from a stream of invective that goes back nearly two decades and still rings so true. As a result, I’m skeptical. Anything that I thought at 18 is suspect at best. But the more I roll it around, the more truth there is. Hey, blind squirrel, nut, and all that.

The more respect I have for what I do, the more respect I have for myself, time, and priorities. So it’s not ironically that I have started to referring to my creative output and process as The Work. Yeah, complete with caps. At first it felt corny and overwrought, but after some time it seems right. There’s a lot that goes into every piece that I create and acknowledging that fact contributes to my momentum. I wish more people could find that respect for the things that they do. We’d get a lot more cool stuff.

No Fear Here

Posted by on May 23, 2011 No comments

Fear is a topic that is floating around the blogs of a number of people that I respect. Fear of doing The Work. Fear of success. Fear of the unknown. What I find interesting about that is the climate that it creates. If enough people are talking about the fear then that means that a significant number are feeling it. And that’s the precursor to great things.

I’m ignoring my fear. In reframing my work and my outlook on life, in some simple and not so simple ways, I’ve decided that the only thing to fear is rejection. If you choose your audience carefully, there is a lot less risk.

What does that mean?

It means that I’m really only interested in about 200 people. Most of my collections of songs have been downloaded by 200 unique persons. Or to 200 unique devices. It’s pretty consistent so that tells me that there are some folks who actually care about or enjoy what I do. That’s my audience and they are the ones that I need to please. Bringing it down to 200 from, you know, THE ENTIRE POPULATION OF THE INTERNET seems to take the edge off.

Besides, I don’t have time to deal with fear. My only real fear now is not getting The Work done. I have two projects right now that can’t die. That’s about all that I can juggle and I’m not doing a fantastic job of it yet. Still, they are alive and well. As long as there is meaningful motion, the is room for great things.

Managing My Expectations

Posted by on May 18, 2011 No comments

Having a little writing project is fun. It’s keeping me busy and satisfied with myself as we work our way through the early months of my daughter’s life. My wife and I have worked out a schedule where she gets two nights a week to do what she wants to do and I get two nights. It’s far from ideal, but something that I’m learning (again) is that the less time I have to do my work, the better and more productive the time I spend on it is.

That makes no sense at all. But maybe it does. I think about music all day long. I have a non-stop stream of melodies, harmonies, and rhythms in my head. I whistle and hum when I’m alone. Stupid things like harmonizing with the drone of my tires on the road or whistling against the sound of the air conditioning. It passes the time and feeds that place in my subconscious where the good ideas start.

This constant thinking about the thing that I love doing also makes that little time that I have more precious. I go into the studio tired and worn down from my day but then I accomplish something, even something small, and I come out feeling like a million bucks. It’s great! And when I’m in the sketching stage of a project, this kind of schedule is perfect. It would be hell if I were trying to get a tune down for release. For that, I need concentrated stretches and many nights in a row to get something consistent. So it looks like I’ll be sketching for another month or so. Works for my family, so it works for me.

The other thing that I have going for me is the Korg iMS-20 app for my iPad. Wow. Tons of analog synth goodness with the added beauty of the Korg Kaos pad. That right there is worth the price of admissions. I find myself sitting in the coffee shop or wherever just noodling away with different timbres. Moving patch cables around with no rhyme or reason. It’s the sonic equivalent of doodling – something that the iPad does very well. It’s a shame you can’t create with that device. It’d be neat. Oh. Wait.

So with my reduced time, I’m making up for it with things that I can do away from the studio and with a baby in my lap. That means a lot of reading, Boggle, and tapping away on my angry little manifesto.

For those who care (all 6 of you), there will be tunes soon. I have a few experiments that I’m trying to make into something worth sharing. The rest of my time is devoted to generating 9 songs and lyrics for a project that I’m putting together with some folks who don’t know about it yet. They’re busy and need to be surprised.

What’s the Problem?

Posted by on May 10, 2011 No comments

Because communication is no longer a problem in our culture, that is to say, access to a large audience no longer requires a large capital investment, there is a belief that any individual should be able to pursue their passion without compromise. This is false.

Life is a web of compromises. Dropping everything to pursue my dream of writing art music would mean sacrificing things that are just as important to me, if not more so, than The Work. That is, if I wanted to pursue my dream in its purest from.

My dream is to spend hours creating beautiful canvases of sound that follow organic forms. I want to explore the limits of technology and music. I imagine trying to capture the sound of Love or Death or Joy. The means exist. If only I could translate that passion and its product into food and shelter. Then I could live the life that is so obviously within my reach, right? And with blogs and the Internet, that’s a breeze, right? Problem solved!

And that’s the source of my frustration. Not every artist has work that can be monetized. And not everyone wants to monetize her work. Does that mean that The Work isn’t important? Does that mean that the artist is a failure? Does that mean that this individual will not contribute to the canon or to the cultural consciousness? Clearly not.

I have been reading a lot lately about creativity and how it fits into the world today. From writing a memoir with no intention of publishing it to finding ways of sneaking in bits and pieces of what we consider to be our calling into our daily lives it seems to me that there has been a demonization of The Day Job in the life of a creative person. As a result, I started writing something down the other day and it won’t stop pouring out. I struck a nerve and it turns out that my relationship to my creative work and what I do for a living is important enough to me to take the time to explain it.

There is a lot of ranting to come. My inner monologue is pretty high pitched right now and the six people who read this blog will be subjected to my manifesto soon enough! But for now, this is a public declaration for accountability purposes. Getting this thing down is important to me and maybe it will be to you.

In the mean time, I am back in the studio tonight and recording more tunes for an upcoming collaboration. Stay tuned!

My Personal iPad Revolution

Posted by on May 6, 2011 No comments

Why does this thing exist?

When the iPad was first introduced, I didn’t get it. It seemed like it wanted to fill a gap that wasn’t there. At that point in time, I was using my iPhone for everything mobile and my MacBook Pro for the heavy lifting. I didn’t see much point to trying to create a space between the two simply for the sake of filling it. Some of my friends felt the same way. Then I got my hands on one and it made complete sense.

To be clear, this device is still very new and the paradigm that it represents is fresh. It’s much more than a big iPhone and at the same time isn’t always less than a laptop. It does have a place and that place is becoming better defined every day.

This isn’t gadget pr0n. I swear.

When I was still hacking away in graduate school, I came across several attempts at touchscreen interfaces. They were first on the order of $10,000 and about a decade later dropped to the $1500 range. And that was for the interface and not the software or the synth hardware that was needed to use it. Regardless of what are now obviously crushing limitations, I got what that could do. Or I thought that I did.

The iPhone interface grabbed me because I could see in an instant how cool it would be to draw sound. TouchOSC does a great job of making that happen. On the iPad, it’s even better. I can control Logic sessions. I can pipe gestures to PureData over wifi. For experimental performers and anyone who does live sound the advantages and pure coolness are obvious. It’s enough to get a lot of music nerds to shell out for the Apple Developer License program and a pile of books to learn Objective-C. Certainly enough to drop about $50 for a catalog of apps that make this dream a reality.

If you’re really into that sort of thing, Curtis (bonus points for being named for Curtis Roads), Gliss, and DopplerPad are great apps to pick up. Why? Because they let you make cool sounds by moving your fingers and that’s what it’s all about. They turn the iPad into a unique musical instrument.

But where the iPad really shines for me is in sketching. And I have to say that my favorite tool is also the source of most of my frustration: GarageBand.

GarageBand

What can I do with GarageBand? Well, I can set up some smart instruments and play with chord patterns. I can take my songs and experiment with drums or bass. I can tweak some synth action that can all be sent over to my Mac, opened in GarageBand, and then sent to Logic for real work (yes, you can skip GarageBand on the Mac but I don’t for a host of reasons whose discussion is for another time). This is great. The interface is amazing for plunking out melodies and picking chord structures (in a well defined key and standard time signature – sorry prog rockers!).

What can’t I do? Well, I can’t take a GarageBand project that I tweak on my Mac and put it back onto the iPad. I understand why. The iPad version is limited to 8 tracks. There are issues with audio data formats. A lot of the innards are just different. But the fact that it’s so easy to create a project and get some momentum going on the iPad is what results in powerful frustration once I hit that first hurdle. It wrecks what could be a really, really nice workflow and replaces the opportunity for doing serious work with a piece with a host of words that make me question the parentage of the product. In short, it does everything so well that it’s a given that it should take it the whole way. That’s actually a compliment for creating a product so great that I just assume that it will do it all. But more than a compliment it’s a source of raging frustration. Yeah, it’ll get there…but I’m here now.

Life after GarageBand

So what do I do about it? Enter Studio.HD. It’s primarily aimed at folks who dig on loops. I don’t, but that doesn’t make it any less useful for me. I can take AIF or WAV files from my Mac and put them into the app via iTunes sharing (OH DEAR LORD PLEASE STOP THE PAIN!!! PLEASE COME UP WITH A BETTER WAY TO GET STUFF INTO MY APPS!!! I AM BEGGING YOU!!!) and then drop them into a multitrack environment that allows me to move snippets around and experiment with my arrangements. It’s really, really easy to use and puts a lot of power into such a tiny device.

The other thing that is great about Studio.HD is that it uses the Sonoma’s Audiocopy. That means that I can pull audio from a number of apps into Studio.HD and make cool things happen. One example is Korg’s iMS-20. It’s a modular synthesizer with a delicious interface that lets me dork around with stuff that I would only dork around with if I had it in my lap. And I do. So I do.

Studio.HD also has just enough features and effects to make working with it worthwhile. Would I use it to produce an album? Maybe. On a desert island. Or as my time for pursuing certain activities becomes so limited that I only have the seconds and minutes I can scrape together between explaining, yet again, Luke Skywalker’s family tree and checking to make sure that the house isn’t on fire. Please don’t take this as disparaging the app. It’s amazing and for $10 you can’t really go wrong.

Bottom line

I’ve mentioned before [link to last post] that I don’t have time for things that don’t work. This really comes down to the fact of my life (and maybe yours too) that I don’t have time. Period. The iPad has become my new way of feeling good about myself and my creative progress. I can open it at a moment’s notice and close it up just as quickly.

And it goes everywhere with me. I’m waiting for the man-bag to come into its own to the point where my son doesn’t refer to my messenger bag as “daddy’s purse.” I need to have it with me. It’s not an addiction like the smart phone early adopters, but rather a mature need to have what I do with me all the time so that I can feel like what’s important to me is not only in my mind, but also at my fingertips when I have a few minutes. If I can push a project along even a little bit while I’m at lunch or waiting for the doctor or even with a sleeping baby on my lap, then the device has more than paid for itself.

Apps

If you are a musician and you have an iPad, then at the bare minimum you owe yourself GarageBand and Studio.HD. For the grand total of about $15, you’ll have that imaginary studio in your hand that we were promised along with flying cars and meals in pill form.